Maximum uptime 497 days?

Oliver Fromme olli at lurza.secnetix.de
Mon Jun 28 09:44:24 PDT 2004


Matt Douhan <matt at fruitsalad.org> wrote:
 > On Monday 28 June 2004 16.03, Oliver Fromme wrote:
 > > Rob <stopspam at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
 > > > By accident I happen to come across this remarkable limit of
 > > > uptime registration for FreeBSD systems. After 497 days, the
 > > > timer jumps to zero again.
 > > > 
 > > > 497 days is less than a 1.5 years !
 > > 
 > > I'd be very embarrassed to have machines with that a high
 > > uptime -- It means that they haven't been updated for that
 > > a long time and are probably full of security holes.  ;-)
 > 
 > why ?
 > 
 > they may not be public machines at all and be isolated to an environment where 
 > security is not the primary concern

You did notice the smiley, didn't you?

But seriously, I think that the widespread uptime fetishism
is somewhat dangerous.  People often try hard to avoid
rebooting machines, just in order to "save their precious
uptime", even if there are good reasons to reboot.

A machine with 1.5 years of uptime -- be it in an isolated
environment or not -- has accumulated the bugs of 1.5 years
that have been fixed in the latest version of the OS, so to
speak.

In fact there is software which I wouldn't want to run even
if it were outdated for only a few days.  Mysql is one such
example.  Every time I looked at the huge list of bugs that
have been fixed in the latest version, I almost got a heart
attack.  (Changing to PostgreSQL was very healthy.)

Those are just my opinions, of course, and YMMV.

I'm very sorry, it got quite off-topic by now.

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author
and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.

"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that,
lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination
of their C programs."
        -- Robert Firth


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